Peanut crunch cabbage and tofu salad
Cooking through doubts and finding hope in the outcome
Welcome to To Vegetables, With Love, a celebration of a vegetable life, less ordinary. ‘ Find archived recipes on my recipe index.
My daughter is reading my copy of Jane Eyre right now. Decades old with yellowing pages, the book has a font so fine that it is illegible to me without the aid of reading glasses. The other day, as we rode the subway together, she pointed out a sentence that I had underlined years earlier,
“To prolong doubt was to prolong hope.”
Doubt is a feeling that feels omnipresent right now.
We are living in uncertain times. Many of us feel unsettled about our future. We take this unpredictability of the world into our personal lives.
Doubt easily multiplies. But perhaps hope does too? I am clinging to this, as I navigate the melancholy first days of summer.
Doubt stopped me from opening the very first advance copy of LINGER which arrived from my Australian publishers a few weeks ago. When we put so much of ourselves into a creative project, when you leave it all on the page, it can often be difficult to process the physical manifestation of our interior thoughts. Any creative person who tells you that they don’t doubt their work is not being truthful. Doubt is a natural spark which pushes us to do better. Because the work that we do is open to interpretation and translation. There are two sides to our work - the creation of it, which is subjective and representative of our unique viewpoint, and then the interpretation and consumption of it, where it must meet the individualized needs of thousands. Have you ever thought about how difficult it is to write a recipe that satisfies the unique palate and sensibilities of many? This is a topic for another post.
When I finally came around to opening the package this week, I found my peace. LINGER is everything I envisioned it would be…and more. The recipes made me hungry again. The design is exemplary. The inescapable doubt will be there until you start cooking from it. Until then, I hold on to hope.
Here’s a sneak peek of the Australian edition, out 26 August. The US (and international) edition will follow shortly after on 7 October.
Doubt often finds a place to stew in the kitchen too. How do we keep ourselves and our households fed when we don’t know what (or want) to cook? Where do we find inspiration in the kitchen when we don’t have any cravings? When cooking dinner feels like an insurmountable task, how do we persist? How do we find hope in the next meal?
Perhaps in cooking, it is the uninspiring times that will unveil silver linings. Maybe we should look for the optimism in the unknown / the imperfect / the volatile.
I took my doubt into the kitchen this week. I teetered between making a rice dish, or one with soba noodles. Or should I finally try that tomato water recipe I’ve been wanting to develop? My doubt found me reaching for napa cabbage and cucumbers from the fridge, both not the freshest and only just okay enough to eat. I had several (like 10!! and honestly not sure how that happened) blocks of tofu without a purpose, so I sliced up one of the pre-baked blocks. I made a peanut sauce, and seasoned it simply with garlic, ginger and chile oil. Spicy, nutty and creamy are always flavours to fall back on. The result is a salad so simple and spontaneous that I probably would not have made it had I thought about it too much. In doubt, I created something that felt happy. And in that moment, I was content. In food, hope floats.
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I just wrote my first piece for Scribehound, a rumination on how soy sauce is often misunderstood and misused as a tool of flavour seasoning. It comes with a recipe for soy sauce and scallion brown butter noodles. Read it here (there’s a trial of $1 for 1 month. Every day, you get a piece of food writing from a different culinary writer)
~
And now a round up on what to cook this week. All NYT Cooking recipes have gift links.
Monday: Sharing this no-cook chili bean salad again because it’s been my most popular salad this week (no doubt due to the heatwave).
Tuesday: This new savoury broccoli soba salad is inspired by yamitsuke, but with broccoli instead of cabbage, bulked up with soba noodles.
Wednesday: This cashew celery is a stellar pantry meal.
Thursday: It’s really fun when NYT cooking shares a salad which elicits the reaction '“YUM!” before you actually realize it’s your own recipe 🤣. This happened with this Corn Salad With Mango and Halloumi salad this week.
Friday: For something warmer, this Spiced pumpkin soup with ginger, red curry paste and crunchy roast cashews will do the trick.
Peanut crunch cabbage and tofu salad
© Hetty Lui McKinnon for To Vegetables, With Love.
Peanut sauce is a comforting, homey dressing, a reliably contented flavor. While smooth peanut butter delivers a better texture for dressing, there is plenty of crunch, from the crisp cucumbers and the crunchy toasted peanuts.
If toasting peanuts from scratch, toast them in a 180˚C / 300˚F oven for 7-8 minutes, until golden. Allow to cool before chopping them up.
Why do we use boiling water? The heat will ‘melt’ the peanut butter and make it easier to whisk and emulsify. All brands of peanut butter will vary in viscosity, so add water accordingly. You are looking for a thick but pourable consistency.
Serves 4
450g (1 pound) Napa cabbage (wombok), thinly sliced
3 Persian/Lebanese cucumbers, trimmed and sliced
400g (14 ounces) baked tofu, sliced
1/2 cup (70g) toasted peanuts, roughly chopped
big handful coriander / cilantro
extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
Spicy peanut dressing
1/3 cup smooth peanut butter
1 tablespoon chile oil/crisp
1 garlic clove, grated
1 inch piece ginger, peeled and grated
5 to 6 tablespoons boiling water
To make the dressing, in a large bowl, add the peanut butter, chili crisp, garlic, ginger and the boiling water and whisk to combine. If it’s too thick, add more boiling water, one tablespoon at a time ,until it’s smooth and pourable.
To the dressing, add the cabbage, cucumbers, tofu, half the peanuts and half the coriander/cilantro and toss well. Drizzle with a little olive oil, season well with salt and pepper and toss again.
To serve, top with remaining peanuts and coriander/cilantro.
Wish I had read this before I had cereal for dinner lol. Came back from yet another soul-sucking walk in the heat with my senior dog and had no motivation to do anything.
here's to linger, relief, inner peace and that perf peanut sauce!!!